In the past, numerous load carrying support devices have been provided which were designed to be directly mounted on surfaces such as walls or doors and retained there by adhesive material. Examples of such devices are found in U.S. Pat. No. 3,504,878 issued to M. Dressler on Apr. 7, 1970.
The prior art structures were usually made by forming the support device in the conventional injection molding machine after pre-cut fibrous backing members or insert pieces have been hand placed in the injection molding machine. Such pre-cut insert pieces were positioned adjacent the mold cavity and directly bonded by adhesion of the molten synthetic material to at least one surface of the fibrous insert. As an alternative, a surface of the fibrous backing member was bonded to a surface of the support device by a separate manual step in which adhesive material was applied to the mating surfaces and such surfaces were placed in contact after the molding operation was completed.
Regardless of the method utilized in securing the fibrous inserts or backing members, the prior practices have been costly, time consuming, and tedious; employing hand labor to accurately manipulate and position the cut insert member prior to bonding them to the appropriate surface of the molded support device.
Furthermore, manual manipulation of the fibrous inserts or backing members has limited the minimum size of fibrous pieces that could be efficiently handled. Such limitations correspondingly have restricted the minimum size of the resulting article of product to which the insert could be bonded. In other words, as the size of the fibrous inserts is made smaller to allow for smaller sizes of support devices, it has become increasingly difficult to handle the inserts and accurately place them on the finished product.
To insure a quality product which can sustain the load subjected to the load carrying members, it is desirable to cover as much rear surface of the support device with fibrous materials as possible to provide the maximum bonding area to the wall surface. However, as the size of the inserts is increased to accomplish this objective, such fibrous pieces are subject to warpage.
Thus, there is a need for a sequential automatic machine operation which would mold a support device and concurrently cut, position and bond the fibrous backing material thereto. As greater surface bonding area is required for adhesion to a wall or the like, a plurality of individual small backing members or inserts can be utilized to accomplish this objective without warpage which has been encountered in the past.